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Steven Prast is old enough to remember when a mobile phone came in a bag. It was too heavy to carry around, so most people mounted it in the car. Prast argued in a Zoom interview with Fortune that what eventually shrank it into something you wear on your wrist was more the battery than the transistor, holding up his own phone as proof.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat took us from that to this is the battery,\u201d said Prast, a former Tesla manufacturing leader who is now chief operating officer of the battery-materials startup Holyvolt.<\/p>\n
By his reckoning, lithium-ion technology is at best 20% of the way through its maturity curve, maybe 10% by conservative estimates. The West won\u2019t win the rest of that curve, he said, by fighting with China over the part that\u2019s already finished.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe will not be able to out-China China on the battlefield that China has defined,\u201d Prast said. \u201cThey\u2019re the world champions at being China.\u201d<\/p>\n
Holyvolt is putting $45 million behind the alternative, all in equity. The Stockholm-based startup told Fortune that it has raised the round from Fifth Wall, Zone II, CC.VC and several angel investors from the defense and finance industries to hunt for battery chemistries China doesn\u2019t control. The round values Holyvolt at $245 million, according to a person familiar with the company.<\/p>\n
The gap Holyvolt is trying to jump is enormous. China makes about 85% of the world\u2019s cathode active material, the part of a battery that largely sets how much energy it stores and what it costs. It makes about 80% of the world\u2019s battery cells. Its lead comes from scaling the two chemistries that dominate today, NMC and lithium iron phosphate, or LFP.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf we take LFP and we try to out-LFP China, we will lose,\u201d Prast said. \u201cWe\u2019ll lose that every day.\u201d<\/p>\n
The answer, he said in a statement, is to \u201cinvent better materials and processes and make them in the West.\u201d He told Fortune he thinks there must be \u201canother dozen cathode materials that humanity just hasn\u2019t figured out yet.\u201d<\/p>\n
A chemistry problem<\/p>\n
If batteries are so far from maturity, why haven\u2019t they followed the steady, predictable curve of computer chips? Prast\u2019s answer is that Moore\u2019s Law comes out of physics, a science humans understand well enough to solve on paper, and batteries belong to another tradition.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you design an airplane and you do that computationally, I will fly on that airplane,\u201d he said. \u201cWith chemistry, there are still huge mysteries.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe problem for battery is that it\u2019s a chemistry problem and not a physics problem,\u201d he said. \u201cIf it were a physics problem, you\u2019d have Moore\u2019s Law.\u201d<\/p>\n
That puts Holyvolt on one side of a split in AI-driven science. Most of the field, Prast said, believes it can solve chemistry computationally. A smaller camp believes AI still needs a physical lab to check its work. Holyvolt is in the second camp.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have to go to the lab and we have to go test,\u201d Prast said.<\/p>\n
The bet<\/p>\n
Holyvolt\u2019s lab is Wildcat Discovery Technologies, a San Diego company it merged with in a deal The Next Web reported at $73 million in March, a figure the firm confirmed as accurate. Founded by Scripps chemist Peter Schultz, Wildcat built a high-throughput system that tests thousands of battery materials in parallel. Over 18 years, the company says, the platform has run more than 225 projects for more than 85 customers, including BMW, and tested more than 500,000 cells.<\/p>\n
That pile of data is the asset Mathias Ingvarsson, Holyvolt\u2019s Swedish founder and CEO, built the company around. Ingvarsson was one of the core drivers behind Tempur-Pedic\u2019s international expansion and its success before and after its IPO on the New York Stock Exchange, and ran its European business for six years after the listing. He told\u00a0Fortune\u00a0that, as one merged company, Holyvolt has\u00a0trained AI models on Wildcat\u2019s results and wired them back into the lab, so each round of real-world tests sharpens the next prediction. The data and the lab underpin the AI models being built to deliver the predictions the market is seeking, as well as to speed up R&D and develop next-gen breakthrough chemistries.<\/p>\n
Most AI-for-science startups start with models and then look for data. Ingvarsson told Fortune that Holyvolt came at it from the other direction, with \u201cthe reinforcement learning we have done for 20 years, which AI needs to actually learn and build on.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re coming from the other side, which is very, very difficult to build,\u201d he said. \u201cTake years and years and years.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ingvarsson said the lab already works 10 times faster than conventional R&D, based on a case study completed with a customer, but Holyvolt thinks closing the loop with AI will push that figure upward compared to conventional R&D. \u201cI\u2019d go so far as to say that we have cracked the code on how to do it,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
The deadline<\/p>\n
The first thing out of that loop is DRX, short for disordered rocksalt, a family of cathode materials that use neither nickel nor cobalt. Prast described it as delivering \u201cNMC-like\u201d performance, \u201cbetter than or equal to\u201d nickel-based chemistry, at roughly the landed cost of LFP in North America. A core design requirement, he said, was that DRX\u2019s supply chain be \u201centirely friendly.\u201d He declined to identify suppliers. DRX has published performance data at scientific conferences, including the International Battery Conference in March 2026.<\/p>\n
The timing includes a built-in deadline. Starting Oct. 1, 2027, Section 154 of the fiscal 2024 defense authorization act bars the Pentagon from buying batteries from CATL, BYD and four other named Chinese manufacturers, even as the military pushes to expand its use of drones. Holyvolt plans to begin commercializing DRX in 2027, starting with unmanned aerial vehicles before moving into mobility. It is also working on formulations for automakers and one aimed at data centers, which need bursts of very high power as GPUs spin up, Prast said.<\/p>\n
\u2018I\u2019ve seen this movie before\u2019<\/p>\n
For Prast, the fight is personal. \u201cI grew up in northern Michigan. Long family history in the auto industry,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019ve seen this movie before. I know how it ends.\u201d<\/p>\n
He framed it as a matter of stability more than rivalry. \u201cIt\u2019s unstable when you have too much concentration in any one place,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Ingvarsson took a similar line. \u201cI have nothing against China,\u201d he said. Then he noted that Volvo Cars, his home country\u2019s best-known carmaker, \u201chappen to be Chinese nowadays.\u201d (China\u2019s Geely owns a majority of the company.)<\/p>\n
Holyvolt doesn\u2019t plan to build gigafactories. Prast said the company is open to licensing, toll manufacturing or joint ventures, and would leave industrial scale to partners. <\/p>\n
\u201cThe transition from there to actual industrial scale is the killer.\u201d<\/p>\n
#Exclusive #Ive #movie #Michiganraised #exTesla #exec #raises #million #break #Chinas #grip #batteries<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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